Headlines

NBC

“Whenever I went online, it really was like getting high on a drug”

Was Walker suffering from a true addiction to the Internet or just a bad habit? An emerging area of research has developed to study those who are obsessed with logging on to the World Wide Web. Scientists say brain scans of heavy Internet users reveal changes in both the size of certain parts of the brain as well as its function. They say it is possible to become addicted to the Internet.

“The new research, whether it’s imaging research or genetic research or other kinds of research, [is] pointing to a biological disposition, something in our biology that makes it easy for us to fall in love with a video game or with the Internet. And for a proportion of us, this love affair can start looking like an addiction,” said Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, who runs Stanford University’s Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Clinic and Impulse Control Disorders Clinic and recently completed one of the largest studies to examine how common problematic Internet use is in the United States.

Blowback

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Comments

Uhh, the article says he was addicted to “World of Warcraft” not the internet as a whole.

You can’t be addicted to “the internet” any more than you can be addicted to phones or tv.

whenever I’m lying in bed at night, I would always … just think about how that day I hadn’t accomplished anything, about how I wasn’t what I wanted to be in life and that I was really, you know, miserable.

yeah, so if someone is unhappy with their life and they choose escapism (which doesn’t have to be through a video game) instead of working on fixing their problems, of course things won’t improve.

people with addictive personalities will always orient their compulsion towards something. you can’t compare their conscious choices to the lack of choice that people have when they are addicted to narcotics.

This article makes me sad. It reminds me that the game I’ve beenplaying for 8 years is shutting down at the end of this month and I really should log on over there so I can keep trying to get the Badge for getting 1250 Badges (only 32 more to go) before it goes away forever.

And I also need to find another MMO to get into, I guess. Most of them seem to be concentrated on the end game, though, and I don’t care for that… I tend to like the mid game more.

If that’s not quite enough, you can point out that gamers drink sodas that are larger than 16 ounces (I’ll kill a 2-liter bottle in one sitting and sometimes go to the fridge for more). And quite often eat salty snacks.

At the very least, you can get NYC to ban the internet based on that.

Uh oh. I sense the banstick coming from allahpundit after that last remark…